The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  That was the letter I read the most often. Because it pained me the most, I suppose. It seemed written by somebody else. I didn’t want Cecily to be so forgiving. I didn’t want to know how sympathetic she was to the man who stole her from me. I wanted her letters about Wakefield to be full of accusation. I wanted her to blame him. I wanted all his cures to have been her killer. The electromagnetic corset sapped my strength, I wanted her to confess.

  • • •

  I DROVE A SLEIGH TO TOWN, my legs under a lap robe of rabbit fur, a bed warmer once hot from its coals stuck in under the cushion of the bench. I looked like an old beggar woman with my head wrapped all round with a scarf, hunched against the wind, a quilt thrown over my shoulders. By the time I reached Bonnevilla, my beard was white with icicles, my cheeks a raw red.

  The mail had resumed, and a postcard waited for me, its delicate paper lace only slightly tattered, its ribbons still in their proper knots. At the center of the heart-shaped card was a cupid stamped in gold foil, and on the back, Cecily had written in a tiny script:

  I used to know a girl named Gertie who worked in a factory making valentines. She sat in a line, and every girl added a little something else to the same heart. Gertie would add a paper rose, or little satin lovebirds, or a little linen card with a poem printed on it. She said sometimes she’d add a strand of her own hair, maybe twisting it around a button, or tucking it into a stitch of thread. She had to quit the factory when she went blind from it. I guess this isn’t a very romantic story, so I’ll end here.

  But she didn’t end there. She ended with an invitation. Meet me at the Fair, she wrote. At three o’clock. In the Agricultural Building on Valentine’s Day, where we once watched the pigeons escape through the hole in the roof.

  My ghost wanted to be seen.

  • • •

  ON THE TRAIN TO OMAHA, on Valentine’s Day, I was filled with dread. That very afternoon I would be faced with Cecily’s imposter. I’d orchestrated my own undoing. I was a morbid, lovelorn fool who’d gone off to dig up another man’s dead wife. The train hurried on its tracks, at an ungodly speed it seemed, the train perhaps trying to make up for all the hours lost in the storm. And I regretted leaving the farm at all. If I’d stayed behind, I considered, I’d still be miles from discovering anything at all.

  I was playing right into Wakefield’s hands. It was him, wasn’t it, behind all this? All he’d ever wanted was everything I ever had. Why wouldn’t he resurrect Cecily just to kill her in front of me? My torture was his hobby. I would suffer more than him.

  On the farm, I’d come to believe in the logic of dreams. I believed in magic, perhaps even a heavenly order. I went up in the balloon so the balloon would come down, so Emmaline would dream, so the cathedral would rise, so Cecily would speak. Not only did I believe it, but it seemed insensible to believe anything else.

  But as the train approached Omaha, black clouds rising from the stacks of the smelting works ahead, I felt I was the pawn of a darker magic altogether. There was only cruelty at work. Nothing else. I existed only to be Wakefield’s victim.

  I thought of the pretty little gun Rosie had strapped to his calf. I could tuck that gun up my sleeve, and as Wakefield stood before me, in the winter ruins of the New White City, I could promise a magic trick. Nothing up my sleeves, I would say, and as I lifted my cuffs to demonstrate that nothingness, I would drop the gun into my hand, and I’d send a bullet into his heart.

  Could I murder a man? Yes. I could aim the gun, and if it was meant to go off, it would go off. And if the bullet was meant to stop his heart, it’d stop his heart. I was nothing but a victim of my own fate.

  I felt a tug at my sleeve, and I realized I’d had my head in my hands. A little girl stood in the aisle wearing a white eiderdown coat, her blond hair as pale as a winter breath. “Are you all right, sir?” she said, with a pitying wrinkle of her brow.

  I nodded. I smiled. “Yes,” I said. I smiled again, and nodded again. “Yes, thank you.” I felt ashamed, as if this angel had been dropped down to earth to look right into my head. I thought of my own little girl, my motherless Doxie.

  She stepped back to her seat across the aisle, next to her mother, who glanced up at me with kind eyes before returning to her book in her hands.

  There’s nothing to be frightened of, I wanted to say.

  • • •

  AS THE TRAIN PULLED UP to the platform, I could only see the city through a fog of frost. Sunlight only barely burned through a spot in the haze, and the snow that fell lightly was ashen, as if from the clouds of smoke that collected up above.

  The fog seemed to muffle not just the city’s light but its noise too, stripping every sound down to its echo. Nearby voices sounded thinned by distance, and the horses’ hooves on the cobblestones had a hollow clip-clop.

  I headed straight to Thirteenth Street, to the Vendome Hotel where I knew I could get a squalid room for nothing much. It was the hotel where traveling salesmen perched as they passed through town to bilk old widows with real estate schemes and monogrammed Bibles. But on the sidewalk out front was a small shanty of boards and tin, and inside the shanty a cop kept cozy with a tiny stove as he watched the hotel’s front door.

  “Nobody goes in, and nobody gets out,” the cop said as he pushed the door open a crack. “Hotel’s under quarantine.” Before I could ask for the specifics of the sickness, he’d shut his door to return to the apple he ate. I looked up at the hotel windows, to his prisoners, men and women who pressed close to the glass to see as far up the street as they could.

  August’s was only a few blocks away, so I headed off to his shop. I needed his forgiveness, I realized. I would fib, if I had to. I would tell him the balloon’s rope had come undone on its own. Somehow, this had to be settled.

  The door to the stairs in August’s building, to his apartment, his lab, to my old office, was locked, so I stepped into his father’s bookstore. The only customer was an old salt in a yachting cap studying a map with a magnifying glass. A long table stretched all down the middle of the shop, and the walls were lined with books packed tight in bookshelves. Atop the shelves were framed posters of all the somewhere elses to go—Paris, Berlin, Morocco.

  I looked over the man’s shoulder; the map depicted some island in some sea, and the mapmaker had playfully inserted a kitten-whiskered sea monster in the corner of the ocean, its serpentine tail crushing a ship.

  At the other end of the shop stood a clerk with his back to me, but when I asked after August, and the man turned, I saw that this was August himself, in a kind of decline. He would consider it a decline, anyway—he looked every bit the dignified businessman. He’d cut his hair to the very nib and he wore a brown suit, a brown vest, a brown tie. The only sign of August anywhere in this serious gent was the cloud of perfume that hovered over him, some scent as precious as peonies, so strong it watered my eyes.

  “Ferret,” August said, and the relief in his voice made me relieved too. He rushed into me, pressing himself against my chest, wrapping his arms around. I brought him closer, put my head to his.

  August stepped away and glanced at the carpetbag at my feet. Before leaving the farm, I’d shoved my few scraps of clothing into the bag. Emmaline had unpacked it, pressed the clothes, and packed the bag up again. “Are you back to stay?” August said.

  “I was going to check into the Vendome,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “The Vendome.” He lifted his hand to his mouth and whispered, “Smallpox.” He said, “We’re all afraid of an epidemic. There are a handful of houses locked up by the police, the families stuck inside, waiting for the disease to come or go. They’ve been trying to build a smallpox hospital at the edge of town, but it’s been too bitterly cold to get the walls up.” He stopped, then took my hands in his, and squeezed them. “But don’t worry, love. There are only a very few sick from the pox. And a few others sick from the pox vaccine. You’ll stay here, up in my room.”

  I heard hardly anything he said.
I was too caught up in his transformation. “What happened to you?” I asked, reaching up to give the prickle of his head a big-brotherly rub with my knuckles.

  “My father fell on the ice,” he said. “Hit his head. Had a hemorrhage. He can’t speak.” He rattled it all off, but I wasn’t convinced it was an answer to my question. August had changed too much.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “So I’m keeping respectable to save the family business,” he said. He inspected his fingernails.

  “You’re a good son,” I said. “Will your old man be okay?”

  “It’s too sad to talk about,” he said. “Everything’s too sad. Cecily died. The Fair ended.” He paused to look me in the eye. “You left,” he said. He kept my gaze for a bit, then looked toward the front window. “I don’t think winter will ever leave. Summer will come and everything will still be frozen.”

  August rushed the old sailor out, and locked up the store to take me upstairs to Rosie’s den. “I turned my laboratory over to Rosie, and he built a darkroom around the sink,” August said. On our way past a hook near the door to the shop, August plucked up a silk scarf. He wrapped it around and around his neck as we climbed the stairs, the pattern bright with parrots with berries in their beaks. And with that scarf flittering from his throat, I began to recognize him again.

  “He uses the apothecary for his chemicals,” August continued. “He photographs his lovelies right there, then sells the pictures to men by appointment. He made a quaint little sitting room with wing chairs and a stove. And a humidor. And he peddles more than just his photographs; he deals in all sorts of respectable filth. They’re things that can’t be sent through the mail, so they’re brought in by smugglers.”

  Rosie welcomed me with a back slap and a vigorous shaking of my hand that threatened to yank my arm from its socket. Then he pulled me in for a hug that crushed my lungs and stopped my breath. He grabbed my head to hold it still while he pushed his lips against my cheek in a kiss.

  “Rosie missed you most of all, I guess,” August said, taking a seat. He crossed his legs, flicked at some dust on his trousers, and spoke rapidly, as if bored. “Where have you been, what did you do, why are you here?”

  I sat in a wing chair and ran my hands along the arms, along the freckled deer hide with the hair left on. Rosie’s parlor was a dizzying display. There were apples and poppies in the wallpaper, and strawberries and lilacs in the carpet. The lamps had red glass globes painted with golden dragons. In a gold-painted cage, two lovebirds thrashed their wings in a lovers’ quarrel. And covering one whole wall, ceiling to floor, were framed paintings of women wearing nothing or next to nothing, naked on a beach or in a field or in a bath. A woman’s nightgown slipped off as she stood from her bed in the morning light. Another woman lifted her skirt to lower her stocking.

  Rosie set a tray atop a low stool at our feet, with a cut glass decanter and tiny goblets, and a plate of little cakes decorated with candied violets.

  “I have an engagement,” I said. The men just looked at me, expecting more. “An appointment,” I said. Silence, still. Then I said, “A business meeting.”

  “I’m so glad,” August said, seeming genuinely pleased. “I’m glad you’re getting back to things.” He leaned forward and reached out to put his fingers in my curls and to pull at them, to examine their length. “You should let me hack at that hair with my scissors,” he said.

  I gently took August’s hand from my head. We sat there, hand in hand, for a moment.

  “Tell me what I’ve missed,” I said.

  Rosie told me about his Josephine, his missus now, and how she’d taken up giving piano lessons to the city’s rich, and played ragtime at night in the orchestra pit of the Orpheum Theater for traveling vaudeville acts. And August told me about Pearl, and how she, like Rosie, was stripping ladies too, but for a more moral purpose. Upon returning from Paris, she’d stopped dressing the manikins of Brandeis to take to the road with Susan B. Anthony, the “suffering sisterhood” as they were known, preaching about the hazards of how women dress. Pearl was part of a campaign to get women to send their corsets to the navy, so the steel ribs could be used to build ships.

  “I think you can see the ladies’ hemlines inching up a little off the ground,” August said, inching up the hem of his own trouser legs as he spoke, baring his ankles. “Back when Omaha was at its filthiest, a lady could drag her skirts through all kinds of muck. Vermin, dead or alive, could be swept right up.” August tiptoed his fingertips, like mouse steps, across my hand and up my arm.

  Rosie crossed his leg too, his trouser cuff lifting, but the holster wasn’t there.

  “And what about the Fair?” I said. “Is the White City still standing?” I hoped for disappointment. I hoped for them to tell me the whole thing had turned to rubble. Then I could get back on the train, that very afternoon, and on the ride home, I would write Cecily. It breaks my heart to tell you this. There’s nothing left of the Fair.

  “The buildings were supposed to be gone weeks ago,” Rosie said. “But there’s a dispute over wrecking contracts. So the flimsy things are just collapsing in on themselves, under the weight of all the snow.”

  “The Fair was supposed to save Omaha,” August said, pouting, “but I believe it ruined it. It was the Fair that brought the smallpox. People carried in with them all sorts of plagues. And any money that came in just fattened the wallets of the corrupt. Even the girls at Anna Wilson’s brothel are struggling—the Fair brought to town every prostitute within three hundred miles, and now that the fairgoers are gone, any poor whore could starve. And we’ll all of us be lucky to survive this awful winter.”

  “I met a professor of the weather,” I said. I picked one of the candied violets from one of the cakes, and let its sugar melt on my tongue. I poured myself some of the liquor from the decanter. “He keeps all kinds of whirligigs and rain gauges on his barn roof. Weather balloons tied to windmills. He could never get much to grow in his dirt, so now his eighty acres is covered with contraptions and motors. He says the farmers brought on their own droughts and their own floods. They break up the soil, and they release all the gases, and they stir up the clouds.”

  “Wakefield’s lake froze over as always,” August said, “but he didn’t even have the ice cut away. He defaulted on his contracts. There’s an ice shortage, and the other ice dealers can’t keep up. We’re freezing to death and dying for ice.”

  “If the smallpox doesn’t kill us,” Rosie said, “the fetid meat will.”

  Another silence fell, most likely from the mention of illness and death, and the suggestion of Wakefield too grief-struck to do business. Then Rosie said, “Do you want to know something about that Wakefield?” He leaned forward, one eye squinting, and the old Rosie I loved returned—Rosie the bitter, the broken-backed, the down-on-his-luck killer of presidents. His top lip lifted in a snarl. “I had a gentleman in here just the other day, a former business associate of Wakefield’s. He was here to buy the diary of a whore, and he had a few glasses of hooch, and he said he hadn’t worked a job for years. He was rich on account of a company he’d owned for a while with Wakefield. It was how Wakefield first got money—a syphilis cure.”

  I listened, the glass of liquor at my lips, the warm smell of it, its fumes, filling my head. Wakefield and this friend, it seemed, won the syphilis business in a poker game twenty years before. They started advertising in the newspapers, and before they knew it they had more orders than they had bottles. Wakefield grew richer and richer, and when a newspaperman, his syphilis uncured, threatened to kick up a scandal, he just bought the newspaper and fired him. He continued to sell the syphilis remedy, and then began to sell a remedy to the remedy, a cure for the cure for the addicts who took more than a spoonful a day. And with all the money from the city’s syphilitics, he bought Omaha, block by block by block.

  “He knew the poisons he was pouring down Cecily’s throat,” Rosie said. “He killed her as surely as if he’d stuck a knif
e in her gut.”

  I swallowed back the booze, to chase away that image of Cecily knifed, and when I returned the little goblet to the tray, its stem snapped off. I had only meant to set the glass down, to stand up, explain that I was late and must leave, but the little snapped stem startled me. I saw a few drops of blood on my trousers leg, then brought my cut finger to my tongue. All the damage was so minute, but it echoed. It magnified. The room shrunk around me, and I found myself crouching, sensing the ceiling pressing against my shoulders, pushing my chest toward my knees.

  I shut my eyes tight, and when I opened them again, a watery vision, a trick of the winter light, danced near the ceiling, a spinning of color, a prism of pale blues and pinks, like Cecily’s gown of chameleon silk in the mirrored dome of the Flying Waltz.

  The New White City still stood, and Cecily would be there soon, to meet me. I was certain of it.

  “What would you have me do?” I said, sounding more angry than I’d meant to. “Call the police? Have Wakefield arrested? For giving his wife something for her headache?” I stood. “Would you have me stick a knife in his gut?”

  Rosie looked me steady in the eye. “Save the girl,” he said. “Take Doxie away from him.”

  It wasn’t that I had never considered it. But it had seemed to me impossible. I couldn’t imagine ever being allowed to even sneak a glimpse of the child, let alone get near enough to lift her from her pram and spirit her away. It was cruel of Rosie to taunt me with it.

  So I left. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I heard August at the top of them. “Don’t go, Ferret,” he called down.

  “I won’t,” I called up to him, stumbling off the bottom step as I turned back. “I’m not. I’ll be away just a minute. I’m late.” I faked a cheery voice so he wouldn’t feel inclined to follow me. As I stepped out the door, I said, “I’ll explain later,” so that I wouldn’t have to explain at all.